Kodi Community Forum

Hi everyone,

Has anyone been able to successfully use an external USB Hard Drive with a Sony Android TV as a 'source' for media in Kodi.

I have spent hours on this and am ready to give up.

I have tried NTFS and FAT32 formats for the drive, Single Partitions and Multi Partitions, Formatting externally and formatting via the Android settings on the TV but to no avail. I have been able to get the 'videos' app on Android TV to see the mounted media but I can't figure out how to get Kodi use it. I refuse to use the half-assed 'Videos' app when Kodi is so much better.

Most advice on the internet tells me to browse to the 'root filesystem' in the menu when adding a video source but Kodi won't let me do that - it just does nothing if i try and drill into that folder. Selecting 'External Storage' just seems to give me the android OS file system itself.

This was pretty much the whole reason I got a Sony TV so would be most gutted if I couldn't attach a USB HD to the darn thing.

Am I doing something dumb? Any help would be most welcome.

My TV is a Sony 43X8000E

NTFS works just fine
look here https://kodi.wiki/view/Adding_video_sources

Yep - that all worked perfectly.

Got in deep on some red-herring style rabbit holes of on-line forums.

Turns out:
1. The wiki post above described exactly my confusion and what I should have done.
2. My drive was not working with USB3.0 for some reason which was why my TV was not recognising it at first. Now it is for some reason. Switching to USB 2.0 port and then back seems to have done something I don't know.
3. Lots of old information out there informing you that FAT32 is the only file-system supported. Guess this is not the case any more. That is a huge relief because the 4GB size limit is impractical in this era.

Everything now works and I am super happy - thanks a lot kinggo!

Thread marked solved.